1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to computer graphics, and more particularly to occlusion culling during rendering in a computer graphics processing pipeline.
2. Description of the Related Art
During graphics processing, a computer is commonly used to display three-dimensional representations of an object on a two-dimensional display screen. In a typical graphics computer, an object to be rendered is divided into a plurality of graphics primitives. The graphics primitives are basic components of a graphics picture and may be defined by geometry, such as point, line, vector or polygon, such as a triangle. The graphics primitives are fed through a graphics pipeline where various types of processing occur and then are commonly displayed on an output device.
Render-to-texture is a mechanism for using the graphics pipeline to compute textures that will be used in subsequent rendering phases. One of the problems with the render-to-texture mechanism is that when it is used to generate dynamic textures, most (if not all) of the scene visibility information is lost. Current culling technology is only useful for reducing the cost of shading in the camera's screen space, but not useful for reducing the cost of computing dynamic textures.
Therefore, a need exists in the art for methods of increasing the efficiency of rendering dynamic textures.